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A Print Shop Cranks Back Up, Ancient as Ever

Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesRobert Warner of Bowne & Co., an old-fashioned printing shop that reopened on Friday within the South Street Museum, which is still being renovated.

The first thing about Robert Warner’s print shop is it is urine-free.

You probably could not have said that about Benjamin Franklin’s shop back in the day — and not because Franklin, who was ahead of his time in so many ways, was giving random drug tests to the men who set the type or inked the press with him.

Eighteenth-century printers, it turns out, used urine on the leather tools that spread the ink on their hand-operated presses. Soaking them in urine kept the leather supple after the printers had washed off the ink. Mr. Warner has a pair that look like maracas, but with an almost flat top.

“I don’t use them,” Mr. Warner said, explaining that the leather was phased out after rubber came along in the 19th century. “I could, I suppose.”

He uses a brayer — a rubber roller — to distribute the ink, and he is inking the press again after a hiatus. He is the director of Bowne & Company Stationers, a print shop at the South Street Seaport Museum in Lower Manhattan.

The shop reopened on Friday, the first visible sign of a change in the museum’s management. The Museum of the City of New York took control of the seaport museum a few weeks ago, aided by a $2 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

The museum had been closed since February, when it furloughed 32 employees, about half of the staff. The printing shop had been closed since then, too. Except for Mr. Warner’s shop, at 211 Water Street, the seaport museum remains closed. (The plan is for the entire museum to open by the end of the year.)

While the museum opened in 1967, the print shop there dates to 1975. Two hundred years before, a dry goods store called Bowne & Company had opened, and it later focused on printing, especially financial documents like prospectuses and merger proxies. One of its customers was Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that collapsed in 2008.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesThe print shop had been closed since February.

Mr. Warner’s print shop recreates an era in which pretty much everything was done by hand. There is the hand-set type. There are the hand-operated presses.

The hands are Mr. Warner’s. And Mr. Warner, 55, sounded as if he had been told once too often that a printer was a machine connected to one of those newfangled computers.

Before the hiatus, Mr. Warner had printed Emily Dickinson poems and keepsakes with the title page of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

Mr. Warner took his place behind a 19th-century press, within reach of two type cases, one above the other. The one on top contained capital letters arranged alphabetically from A to Z. The uppercase letters, he said. The one below had the uncapitalized type, the lowercase letters.

And they were all backwards. “The p and q look much the same, hence the term ‘Mind your p’s and q’s,’ ” Mr. Warner said. “But one day someone from Ireland came in and said it’s pints and quarts, a drinking term, not a printing term.”

Mr. Warner arrived at the print shop in 1995 as a volunteer prepared to learn from the master printer who ran the operation at the time. “I became an apprentice at 39,” he said. Like his father and grandfather, he had been an optician.

On the press, he said, the quoins were in place. They are wedge-shaped blocks that hold the type in its form, known as a chase. He rolled the well-inked brayer across a woodcut of a galloping horse and type that read “Bowne & Co. is back in motion!”

“I wanted something that showed we were going again,” he said.

He turned a crank, and a sheet of paper slid into place. Then he pulled a lever, and the paper was pressed tight against the type.

“This is the way Benjamin Franklin would have done it,” he said.

He paused, sighed and added, “So many words, so much type to distribute.”

Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesThe print shop opened in Lower Manhattan in 1975, but its roots extend to a printing business that dates to the 19th century.

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